Yes it can be achieved with note editing software. For example I use Guitar Pro (refering to the exthread on writing beats). I don't know about the rest but GP is mostly guitar-oriented (and thus tab-oriented) so it's not entirely standard notation like NoteEdit or something like one of these transcriptions: http://www.yanicbercier.com/transcription.asp

If you want interoperability (woo reminds me of OOXML standardisation) then you should stick to really standard kits, following the traditional "GMKit" midi percussion standard (H1's default).

It seems to be hard in linux to find a program which is able to edit drum notation (this is not the problem) and then export it to midi and play it with hydrogen.... and have a good match between the drumkit and the notation....

The only Linux notation package that has a readily accessible drum clef and the ability to map the lines and spaces to a specific part of a drum kit is MuseScore. I didn't find the mapping is not necessarily intuitive, but it does work!

There's a comprehensive table in Guitar Pro for all elements in Guitar Pro,
unfurtunately this is missing in TuxGuitar...

Just try it yourself by adding a track and set it to "Percussion track".
If "Showing Notation" is enabled, you can see the drum notation in Guitar Pro.
It's just learning by doing. Download some Guitar Pro tabs with incl. drum track
and see how it is done. (i.e. Pearl Jam - Black (live) or Goo Goo Dolls - Iris)
I know this is not a good method for learning / understanding drum notation,
but it may work for you, too.

I need to write up some drum parts so I've spent the last week trying the Linux scoring options to see if anything may do a better job for me than rosegarden.

denemo looks like the best contender so far but Ive enountered a couple of issues which prevent me from using it. Hopefully a forum member will be able to help as I've had no response from denemo-devel yet.

Writing drum music involves me very frequently changing the notehead type - I need to do this multiple times with every new bar. I've worked out how to change the notehead under denemo but only for one note at a time. How do I either change the notehead of multiple selected notes and/or how do I change the notehead for notes to be entered? Ideally I'd be able to switch between the 4 different noteheads with a single key press.

Once I've got over that hill, I'm hoping denemo will offer me a way to map my drum notation to the correct channel and notes required to correctly trigger a GM-aligned drum kit sf2 so that I need not edit or create a soundfont to match my chosen notation. Is this a feature?

Thanks for your help!

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danboid wrote:denemo looks like the best contender so far but Ive enountered a couple of issues which prevent me from using it. Hopefully a forum member will be able to help as I've had no response from denemo-devel yet.

Denemo is a front end to Lilypond. For doing specialized notation, it might be easiest to just interface with Lilypond directly using something like Fescobaldi. Since your scope is rather narrow (drums with specific midi requirements), once you set up a Lilypond template that works (assuming you can get the output you want after some experimentation), making your scores should be easy.

My current plan is to notate in RG, export to lilypond then either modify the output by hand or use Frescobaldi or Denemo to help with the formatting.

It'd be nice to be able to notate in denemo as its more specialised, has a wysiwyg UI (unlike Frescobaldi), I don't use RG for anything else other than its point n'click notation functions and denemo is cross platform, unlike RG.

Are you new to Linux Audio? This manual explains how to install KXStudio, set up and use JACK, mimimize latency, lists the best Linux AV apps and much more all in a concise and easy to understand format.